Team DisKinect is one of the Art Hack Weekend Winners!

This past Sunday, August 7, the winners for Art Hack Weekend were announced. After an intense development cycle, we created a working prototype for a puppet, controlled simply by a person’s movements. We won the competition along with Free Fall Highscore.

Over the next eight weeks, The Creator’s Project and Eyebeam will provide us with a development stipend, a complete studio environment, and additional resources to fully realize our project for an October exhibition in DUMBO! This week we started our orientation, and we will soon have everything we need to make our hack into a work of art.

Stay tuned for updates on our progress as we continue to develop the project.

The Eyebeam art hackathon this week represented the first step in visualizing the world we find ourselves in. A world that is at times physical, and at times virtual. A world that flows back and forth between the concrete and the abstract. A world in which our expression in the physical domain, are distorted, and sometimes disconnected entirely, from our expressions in the online domain.

Our weekend project reflected these principles, and much more, with a simple doll controlled through a person’s physical movements. The project married together a combination of open source software, Microsoft’s XBox Kinect, and the open source Arduino hardware. As one of the two winners, we’ll be evolving the concept into a fully articulated and designed marionette, and we’ll be updating this blog with news along the way. In the meantime, read this article to get a sense of how Diskinect came to life this past weekend.